Daniel French's third season of Caterham Racing. Competing in the 2019 Motul 270R Championship. This blog shows my full Caterham Journey from the build of the awesome R500 Duratec, the Academy Car in 2017, track day information, videos and race results.

Thursday, 8 December 2016

Academy Car Build - Day Nineteen - Breathing In and Out

As I write this post, I've finished day nineteen of the academy car 'build'... It's twenty past midnight, and today's 'session' was a good six hours.

So here's what I managed to complete this (yesterday!) evening... Firstly I sorted out the front brake hoses which I hadn't fully attached to the car, and also I'd missed off a spring washer from the top suspension bolts, so fitted those too.

As I was working on the front of the car I decided to 'bite the bullet' and fit the breather bottle. There aren't really any fitting instructions for this, so I've kinda done my own thing (which I think is right, but I'll find out at the PBC (Post Build Check!)) The first part of this is to position the breather bottle with the holder and the blanking plate behind the battery, where the heater would go and then mark out where to drill holes to rivnut the bottle holder into place. The factory way of fitting the blanking plate, is to remove some of the rivets along the scuttle and then slightly prise out the scuttle edge and pop the blanking plate in underneath... The picture below is of the breather bottle holder, rivnutted into place.

Caterham Oil Breather Bottle holder rivnutted onto blanking plate

Don't make the same mistake as I did though - once you put the blanking plate in place, you'll soon figure out you have to rivnut through the front of the scuttle too... With my work undone, and then redone, I gave the rivet holes a little drill out, and then readied the new rivets.

And with the rivets, riveted! the blanking plate and breather bottle holder are in place.

blanking plate and breather bottle holder rivetted into location

Energy for the evening was courtesy of Pizza Hut - probably about 10,000 calories which isn't good for my waist line, but 'I earned it!' To be fair I don't think I ate more than a third, but even so - it wasn't as good as I remembered them tasting!

Pizza Hut Meat Feast with Chillis

Full of pizza energy, I fitted the breather bottle, and then drilled out the holes for the breather pipes and secured them to the breather bottle.

With the breather bottle finally fitted, next up was the airbox. It seemed like I needed to cut a little bit off the hose from the airbox to the throttle body, so I carefully cut off about 5mm, and the fit was much better.

Air box (and filter) fitted

In my building frenzy, (and this was a few days ago) I ham-fistedly snapped the wheel speed sensor cable... Not to worry, these connector blocks come apart relatively easily (when you know how), the wires were soldered back onto the connectors, and connectors pushed back in - job done. Picture is more for reference as to which colour wire goes into which hole, but it was a half hour job, that I could've done without!

Cable snapped on my wheel speed sensor, not to worry, I've fixed it

And finally for the evening - the exhaust. Firstly it's worth fitting a load of masking tape around the aperture so as not to scratch / scuff your lovely paint (if you've had your car painted that is!)... The primaries didn't seem to match up with the part numbers in the manual, but it's not that hard to fit them - they go in with the rear pipe first, moving forward one by one.

Primaries inserted and fitted from left to right

The catalytic converter is then fitted to the primaries, along with the guard, and a bit of IVA scuttle trim around the leading edge, and then the exhaust locates into the rear of the cat. Job done.

With the exhaust now fitted, the car is agonisingly close to being finished

I am sooooo close to finishing... I think there's only the following bits left to do:-

Fit steering wheel

Connect battery terminals

Fit wheels

Bond front wings and wire in headlights

Attach rear wing lights

Front suspension torquing (when car is on level ground)

Some IVA and weather gear stuff

Fluid Fill

And then hope it starts!

I'll try and get everything finished off tomorrow night and with any luck I'll be able to start it before Ian comes on Monday to collect it for it's PBC. I've a fairly 'busy' weekend coming up, so my last chances to work on the car will be Thursday evening, Friday evening (if I'm lucky) and perhaps a little bit of time on Saturday morning...